Emily leads us to a table in the back and Owen and I secure the booth side. You can take me to the shittiest restaurant or bar and I’ll seriously be happy if I can sit at a booth. I don’t even have to drink. Sitting is one of life’s most underrated pleasures. The velvet cushions feel extra padded and I sink right in, laying my head back against the padded back before it disappears into the wall of skulls. I sigh, happily.
“I knew you’d like it,” Linden says as he sits down across from me. “I thought these booths just screamed Stephanie.”
“The skulls are pretty cool,” James comments, looking around him. Actually of all the people here, he’s the one who fits in the most, balancing that line between edgy rock and roller and calculated hipster.
Owen doesn’t say anything for a moment then nods at the bar. “They have Perkele Vodka,” he says, spouting the name of his favorite obscure Finnish brand. That’s the most Owen will say about this place. It’s definitely not his scene and his subtle glares have now changed from James to Linden.
An hour later, after Linden bought me two birthday (filthy, dirty) martinis, Owen has gone to the bathroom and James has stepped outside for a cigarette. We are alone.
I’ve missed this.
“I don’t think your boyfriend likes me very much,” Linden tells me after he has a swig of his beer and rocks the bottle between his large hands.
“Owen?” I ask. It sounds weird to hear him referred to as my boyfriend, especially coming from Linden’s lips (which, after two filthy, dirty martinis, look far superior to Owen’s).
“Do you have other boyfriends I should know about?” he asks with a raise of his perfectly arched brow.
“No. Anyway, none of the guys I see like you very much.”
He smiles. It’s a cocky bastard smile. “Is it because they all know we’re getting married one day?”
I narrow my eyes as my heart kicks up a notch. “No. And don’t mention that to Owen, okay?”
He looks surprised. “Why not? It’s true.”
I rub my lips together and reach into my clutch for lipstick.
“It’s true, Steph,” Linden repeats. As I swipe the magenta lipstick on, he frowns at me. “Don’t tell me you actually expect to be with this chump in a few years.”
I give him a look. “Look, I know he doesn’t seem like a…well, a me kind of guy, but I’m in love with him, so yeah, I do expect to be with him in a few years. Don’t call him a chump.”
He blinks rapidly and the muscle along his chiseled jaw tremors. “You’re in love with him?”
“Don’t act like this is terrible,” I tell him even though the look on his face is making me feel something terrible inside. “It was bound to happen. It’s good. Really, it’s good. I’m happy.”
“Are you?”
I tilt my head as I examine him. Before my eyes the pained look on his crinkled brow disappears, the tick on his jaw stops. He relaxes. He becomes my best friend Linden again. I’m not sure who that other guy was. But I think I wanted him to stay for a moment longer.
“Nevermind,” he says quickly. “You are happy, I can tell. Well, then fuck it, I’m happy for you baby blue, I really am. And he’s a lucky fuck.”
I’m still watching him. “Did you really want to marry me?” I ask. “Or did you just want to get married?”
A trace of a smile forms on his lips. “Now you’ll never know.”
Owen comes back from the bathroom and I sit back in my seat and give him a broad smile. I feel like I’ve been doing something wrong, even though I haven’t.
Linden smacks his palm against the table, excuses himself and gets up. I watch his tall, muscled frame as he leaves the room, presumably going after James. I notice most of the women’s heads turn as they also watch him go.
There is a jellyfish sting in my heart but I swallow it down and look at Owen.
Owen’s a cute guy. He’s dependable. He’s the solid rock in my life. He’s not going anywhere.
I am in love in Owen Geary. Twenty-seven will be the best year yet.
CHAPTER THREE
28
LINDEN
“Hey fuck face,” my brother’s voice chirps though the phone.
“Hey fuck face yourself,” I tell him, clearing my throat. I can tell I’m getting sick, my throat feels like it’s been scraped with barbed wire. This is not what I need right now. “What do you want?”
“Well, I thought I’d wish you a happy fucking birthday, you damn git.”
“Right,” I say with a nod he can’t see. I get my keys out of my jeans and open the door to my Jeep. In the background one of the choppers is taking off and I quickly get inside the Jeep so I can hear Bram better.
“Are you at the airport? Don’t tell me you’re working on your birthday.”
“Most people have to work on their birthday,” I point out to him. Of course, Bram doesn’t fucking work at all, he just tools around Manhattan like some over-privileged playboy. Some might say I’m no different, but at least I have a bloody career. Bram has coasted by on my parent’s money and status for his whole life. The funny part is, he’s the older one; he should have set an example for me.
I guess in some ways he did. When I finished high school, I vowed to become the opposite of Bram.
“You should take the day off,” he says. His words are punctuated by a yawn and I can just imagine him with arms stretched over his head. “Have you talked to mum and dad yet?”
I sigh and lean back in the seat. It’s April and it’s cold as hell. Even though I moved to San Fran in my early twenties, I still haven’t adjusted to its bipolar weather. In New York, you got the full four seasons in their proper order. In Aberdeen, Scotland, where I grew up, you got the same on a milder scale. Here, it’s hot in the fall and cold in the summer and foggy most days of the year. I’m tempted to run the Jeep and put the heater on but I can just imagine Stephanie making fun of me for that.
“No, I haven’t talked to them for a few weeks,” I tell him. And by that we both know it means I haven’t talked to my father in a few weeks. My mother never calls and that’s a fucking good thing.
“I hope they don’t forget your birthday,” Bram says in a way that he means he hopes they do. “At least you have a good brother.”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah.”
“Listen,” he goes on and from his tone I immediately know that my birthday wasn’t the real reason he called. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”
I tug on my ear in surprise. “Do you a favor?”
“Yes, Linden, it’s what brothers do for each other. I’m going to be in San Francisco next weekend and I’ll be bringing my girlfriend. She loves Alcatraz. Do you think you could give us a ride there?”
“Give you a ride there?” I repeat, dumbfounded. What the fuck?
“Yeah,” he says, as if he hasn’t said something completely ridiculous. “You know, on the helicopter.”
I let out a long, exhausted sigh and pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to gather my wits. “Bram, look. I work for a charter company. I don’t actually have my own helicopter to fly you all over the place.”
“So we’ll charter one.”
“And you can’t just fly over to Alcatraz. It’s a protected area. You can’t just land there without permission. I’m not even sure if there is a landing pad there.”
“So get permission.”
I sigh again. “Not going to happen. Why are you even coming over here anyway? You never come to the west coast.”
“I’m bored,” he says. “And Azurra has family in the Bay Area.”
“Azurra?”
“My girlfriend.”
“Of course that’s her name.”
“At least I have a girlfriend.”
“Nice, Bram. How old are you again, thirty-two?”
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty-eight, as of today. But that’s not my point.”
“So can you take us or not?”
“Hold on
,” I tell him, exasperated, and scroll through my phone to my appointment calendar. I have a flight in the morning but nothing in the afternoon. I tell him I can book it for him and ensure I will be the pilot that day, private flight. But there will be no bloody Alcatraz.
As soon as I’m off the phone, I immediately text Stephanie.
What are you doing next weekend? Want to go for a ride?
She knows what that means, she’s been up a few times already and absolutely loves it. My other best friend, James, loves it too but I don’t get quite the same thrill watching him as I do watching her. Her whole face lights up and she wriggles in her seat like a little kid. Besides, she would make a great buffer between my brother and I and I’m sure she could find something to talk to Azurra about. Steph gets along with everyone – for the most part – whereas James can be an emo little fucker.
It doesn’t take her long to answer.
Sure, is James coming?
Now I feel a bit guilty that I’m not inviting him. It’s a matter of space though.
No, my brother will be in town with his girlfriend so I thought it would be just the four of us.
A beat passes before she answers: Like a double date?
I don’t know, do you put out? I text back.
Shut up, she answers. Fine, that sounds good. Are we still on for the Lion tonight?
I close my eyes and lean my head back against the seat rest. I can’t imagine celebrating anything at the moment. In fact, I just want to go to sleep.
Finally I text back: I don’t think I’m going to go.
She answers: But it’s your birthday.
I’m aware. But I think I’m coming down with something. I’m just going to stay at home, watch a movie and take it easy.
You’re getting old, she texts back. She might be right. In the past I would have gone out and pounded back the beers whether I felt sick or not. But now, that sounds a wee bit hellish.
What I would actually like is to invite her over to watch a movie with me.
And normally I would do just that but my invitation has always included James and sometimes her high-maintenance friend Nicola. But I don’t want them there, I just want her there.
A few years ago, I made a pact with Steph that we would marry each other if we weren’t in serious relationships by the time we were thirty. She doesn’t turn twenty-eight until October and we’ve got a few years on top of that but Steph ended her relationship with her cheating turdsniffer boyfriend, Owen, a month ago. I haven’t been seeing anyone for the last two months.
I want now to be thirty. I want now to finally put something in motion.
The thing is, I know Stephanie thinks the whole pact is a joke, something I made up for fun and would never actually follow through on. And why would she think otherwise? Romance, even sex, has never been a possibility for us. We’ve been nothing but good friends from the moment we first met.
Actually, that’s not true. The moment I first laid my eyes on her as she wore her tight jeans, layered ripped tank tops that showed off just the right amount of flesh, her hair this crazy color of blue, being her friend was the last thing on my mind.
I wanted to fuck her, bad.
But it was James who she went out with and that was the end of that. I became her friend instead.
The desire to fuck her never went away though. But I try my hardest to keep that to myself. Going after your best friend’s girl is unspeakable. You just don’t do it. Even when their relationship crash lands and you find yourself torn among the wreckage, it’s still something you can’t even think about.
Especially since we’ve become such good friends.
Especially since sometimes I think James is still in love with her.
Especially since she thinks I’m the world’s biggest player.
She’s not wrong. But if I ever made a play for her, she’d no longer think that.
In some ways the pact is stupid – it’s just putting something off that I could take care of right now. But I’m afraid to act on it in case James really is still in love with her. I’m afraid that she’d turn me down, tell me she’s never thought of me as more than a friend and that she doesn’t want to ruin our friendship. I’m afraid I could fuck up two friendships at once.
So the pact goes on the backburner.
Two more years and then I’ll face it.
Just two more years until everything changes, for better or for worse.
My throat feels even worse now, scratchy and thick. I drive home to my flat and by the time I get in through the door, I have the chills.
I take a hot shower, trying to get warm, then wrap myself up in a sleeping bag I pull out from the closet. It smells like bug spray and pine needles and a memory of James and Steph and her roommate Kayla floats into my head.
We were camping up by Muir Woods and Steph and I were collecting kindling for the fire. I was drunk in that way where you can’t censor anything you say, where the truth comes rolling out before you can stop it. It’s a dangerous drunk and I was so fucking close to coming onto Steph, to telling her how I really felt.
I think she noticed something was happening too because our conversation abruptly went to Kayla.
“You think she’s hot, don’t you?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Of course.” Because Kayla is hot. Fit and tiny with creamy Japanese skin and long black hair. She’s a nice girl, too, if not a wee feisty. But she wasn’t Stephanie.
“I think she likes you,” Steph had said.
“What are we, in grade school? Did she tell you this at recess?”
Steph watched me for a moment before she rubbed her lips together and said, “Fine, I think she wants to fuck you. Does that help?”
I couldn’t understand what she was doing. Was she baiting me, wanting me to say I wasn’t interested? Or was she actually trying to get me and Kayla to hook up? Did that not bother her at all?
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I told her, because it was true.
I took a step closer to Stephanie. She has these big blue eyes that go as wide as the moon. They went wider than that.
“I think you’d make a cute couple,” she said quickly and then turned on her heel and went back to the fire.
Later that night I fucked Kayla up against a tree, then fucked her in my tent the next morning, after James had vacated to make breakfast.
We hadn’t made a cute couple. Kayla and I only fooled around for a few more weeks until I broke it off and then had to avoid Steph’s flat for a while.
Aside from fucking Kayla, I felt like I fucked something else up. It was that moment where I think any possibility of something between us finally vanished. After Kayla, I made a conscious decision to get Steph out of my head. I fucked more girls, became the player she always thought I was. I did what I could to just focus on her as a friend.
And it worked. But then life got in the way. At twenty-five, I was already sick and tired of just a string of girls who meant nothing to me. I didn’t want that in my life. I had grown up with that, with a vacant, pill-addicted mother and a cold father who never showed any love to each other, let alone to their two sons. I grew up with high society and dead hearts, lazy morals and cruel ambition.
I didn’t want to become like them. I wanted something real and pure and true and fuck it if it sounds like pussy-whipped bullshit because I needed something in my life that made my life worth sharing.
I wanted Steph. My best friend. She was my baby blue and I was her cowboy.
So a pact, a foolish, naïve pact, was born.
I take the sleeping bag over to the couch and curl up on it. I’m about to switch on the TV but the sickness pulls me under.
When I wake up later, it’s because my cell phone is ringing. There is drool everywhere.
I quickly wipe my mouth and answer it. It’s Steph.
“Hey Steph,” I say but it comes out in a muffled slur.
“Linden? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sorry,” I sa
y, coughing lightly. “Just fell asleep for a bit.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Sick as fuck.”
“Need me to come over?”
Yes, I fucking need you to come over. I find myself sitting up a little straighter. “Are you going to wear a slutty nurse’s uniform?”
Pause. “You’re a pig.”
“Oink. But seriously. Nurse’s uniform?”
“Do you want me to come over or not?”
I grin. “Yes, yes. I’ll be on the couch.”
“Please be wearing clothes.”
“No promises.”
Forty-five minutes later, I hear Steph’s spare key in the door and she appears holding two bags of groceries. She looks flustered, her face a bit red, her long dark blonde hair a mess. She looks like she just had sex and I have an image of her dropping the bags and coming over to the couch, flipping up her fringe skirt to straddle me.
I try to adjust my pants under the sleeping bag without being too obvious about it.
“You look like shit,” she says before she takes the bags over to the kitchen. I can hear her rummaging around in there like it’s hers, things going in cupboards, the kettle being switched on.
When she comes back out, she has a small plastic cup filled with blue liquid.
“Are you drugging me?” I ask her.
“Yes, Nyquil,” she says. She shoves it in front of my face. “Drink it or die.”
I warily take the cup from her. “If I recall correctly, the last time I took Nyquil I pretty much died.”
“That’s because you chased a six-pack with it. Now drink it.”
I knock back the obnoxious blue syrup and relax back into the couch. I have to say, it’s kind of nice to have someone take care of you, especially someone with an ass as nice as hers. It seems to get better every day.
She disappears back into the kitchen and then comes out with mug full of steaming hot tea. “It’s got lemon and honey in it,” she says. She’s about to turn around again and head back to the kitchen but I reach out and grab her hand.
The movement shocks her still and she stares down at my grip around her wrist.
“Just relax, baby blue,” I tell her and tug her toward me. “Stop fussing over me.”